The fictive reflex: a fresh look at reflexiveness and narrative representation

Reflexiveness in literary contexts tends to be assimilated to self-reference; to the various ways in which a work may foreground the artifice and conventionality of its own features as representation, narrative or language. In this sense it is equated with metafiction, and regarded as a sophisticated and highly self-conscious use of narrative; here, however, I offer a contrary view of reflexiveness, one which sees it as elementary, pervasive, and constitutive of fictionality. In this view, there is a continuity between the basic logic of mimesis and the self-conscious “baring of the device” that, for the Russian Formalists, defines the literary. I begin by clarifying the nature of (fictive) representation as an act, and identify its intrinsic reflexiveness, and go on to compare this perspective with both the metafictional notion of reflexiveness and the theoretical discourse on reflexiveness around “mirror neurons” in cognitive literary studies. I then situate reflexiveness within a broader interdisciplinary environment, framed by complex systems science and the conceptualization of emergence in terms of representational recursiveness, which allows the two sides of the discussion so far to be understood as complementary aspects of reflexiveness, one of which aligns with the cultivation of (self-) consciousness, the other with the simple enactment of systemic relations. Finally I address the conceptual challenge presented by an account of narrative, and fiction, based upon reflexiveness, and suggest some ways in which it can be understood.

The fictive reflex: a fresh look at reflexiveness and narrative representation

Neohelicon
The fictive reflex: a fresh look at reflexiveness and narrative representation
Richard Walsh 0
Narrative 0
0 University of York , York , UK
Reflexiveness in literary contexts tends to be assimilated to self-reference; to the various ways in which a work may foreground the artifice and conventionality of its own features as representation, narrative or language. In this sense it is equated with metafiction, and regarded as a sophisticated and highly selfconscious use of narrative; here, however, I offer a contrary view of reflexiveness, one which sees it as elementary, pervasive, and constitutive of fictionality. In this view, there is a continuity between the basic logic of mimesis and the self-conscious ''baring of the device'' that, for the Russian Formalists, defines the literary. I begin by clarifying the nature of (fictive) representation as an act, and identify its intrinsic reflexiveness, and go on to compare this perspective with both the metafictional notion of reflexiveness and the theoretical discourse on reflexiveness around ''mirror neurons'' in cognitive literary studies. I then situate reflexiveness within a broader interdisciplinary environment, framed by complex systems science and the conceptualization of emergence in terms of representational recursiveness, which allows the two sides of the discussion so far to be understood as complementary aspects of reflexiveness, one of which aligns with the cultivation of (self-) consciousness, the other with the simple enactment of systemic relations. Finally I address the conceptual challenge presented by an account of narrative, and fiction, based upon reflexiveness, and suggest some ways in which it can be understood.
Reflexiveness; Emergence
Representation
Cognition
In this essay I offer a view of fictionality as a narrative rhetoric continuous with the
most elementary logic of narrative, via the notion of reflexiveness. I do so by
drawing upon a fundamental distinction between two complementary aspects of
reflexiveness, one of which aligns with the cultivation of (self-) consciousness, the
other with the simple enactment of systemic relations, in order to show the
interdependence between them. My starting point, however, is a recent
narratological debate which crystalizes a preliminary issue concerning fictive narrative
representations themselves. In the introduction to The Emergence of Mind, David
Herman presents his critique of a prevalent doctrine among literary narrative
theorists that he dubs the ‘‘Exceptionality Thesis’’: the claim, as he puts it, that
‘‘readers’ experiences of fictional minds are different in kind from their experiences
of the minds they encounter outside the domain of narrative fiction’’
(Herman 2011,
8)
. His own, anti-exceptionalist, stance is a claim for a certain cognitive continuity
in our understanding of fictional and real other minds, though he is careful to say
that he is not ‘‘suggesting that interpreters of fictional narratives adopt the same
stance toward the situations portrayed in those texts that they adopt toward
situations in narratives that make a claim to fact’’
(Herman 2011, 33, n.10)
. It is
reasonable to question the legitimacy of Herman’s discrimination between our
stances towards fictional narratives and fictional minds, and indeed it has been
questioned, notably from the perspective of unnatural narratology—one of the
recent theoretical trends Herman explicitly associates with the Exceptionality Thesis
because of its anti-mimeticism
(Herman 2011, 11)
; I’m thinking in particular of
Henrik Skov Nielsen’s response in his contribution to the volume A Poetics of
Unnatural Narrative
(Nielsen 2013)
, which takes up Herman’s challenge to
unnatural narratology’s version of exceptionalism.
I begin with this debate about the exceptionality, or otherwise, of narrative
fictions, because I am struck by the extent to which both sides cast their general
arguments, and their finer conceptual distinctions, in terms of the objects of
representation. That is, both Herman and Nielsen (and in truth most narrative
theorists of whatever stripe) contest the nature of the disputed continuities and
discontinuities between fictional and non-fictional narrative on the ground of a
common assumption that fictions are representations of fictional objects. The issue
then becomes a matter of whether certain of these objects (fictional minds) are
intelligible in the same terms as other minds in the real world, or require a different
kind of interpretative attention (intrinsically, or just in certain cases). The premise of
a categorical distinction between fictional and non-fictional objects is explicit even
on Herman’s side where the main thrust of the argument is for continuity; as when
he urges that acknowledging ‘‘the ontological divide between fiction and nonfiction
is consistent with hypothesizing that the same protocols for engaging with minds cut
across this divide’’
(Herman 2011, 12)
.
My perspective on fictionality, however, cuts across the terms of the debate
itself.1 Both sides share the assumption that fictional representations are to be
distinguished in ontological terms, whereas I take the view that a representation is
fundamentally an act. That is, I want to understand the word ‘‘representation,’’
always, as less a noun than the nominalization of a verb. On this view, acts of fictive
1 The premises for the following outline of my approach to fictionality are those developed in The
rhetoric of fictionality
(Walsh 2007)
.
representation are real acts, discursively—and, if you like, ontologically—
continuous with other (real, communicative, representational) acts. Within this
discursive continuity, however, fictionality is a discrete rhetoric, or rhetorical set;
one that is extremely pervasive, both culturally and cognitively. It follows that, far
from being one pole of an absolute ontological binary, fictionality has a complex
history, and indeed a prehistory. The history refers us to emerging work in
diachronic narrative theory, a post-classical development in narratological research
initiated by, among others, Monika
Fludernik (2003)
. This essay concerns itself with
the pre-history, or at least the theoretical parameters of that pre-history; that is, my
focus is upon considerations both historically and logically prior to the cultural
history of diachronic narratology.
Fictive narrative acts have a second-degree relation to informative narrative acts;
that is, they are fictive by virtue of a disavowal of their direct, assertive relevance in
representational terms, whether that disavowal is implicit or explicit, or is external
or internal to the fictive discourse itself. All of fiction’s distinctive characteristics
are contingent possibilities that arise in consequence of this reflexive move; fictive
representations work fictively to the extent that they work through a dissociative
framing of the indicative force of the representational act. This framing is reflexive
because it takes the same form as the indicative act it disavows; reflexiveness, in this
sense, is representational recursiveness. This essay is marked by an extraordinary
preponderance of words with a ‘‘re-’’ prefix, and my contention is that in all cases,
beginning with representation, the ‘‘re-’’ is the critical feature. The ‘‘re-’’ prefix
articulates a relation, and often a recursive relation, to something logically or
temporally prior, and this is the salient feature of acts of representation. My account
of fictionality situates its reflexiveness in the context of a broader reflexive logic,
one that is intrinsic in representation itself and accounts both for the possibility that
fictive acts may arise and for the way that fictive acts work. With respect to the
ontological premises of the exceptionality debate above, it is at best a moot
philosophical point whether such fictive acts can be said in some sense to generate
or refer to objects of their own. The pragmatics of the interpretation of fiction do not
involve fictional objects or represented objects.2
The view I am expounding here turns instead upon acts, situated in relation to
temporally or conceptually prior acts, and in doing so it privileges a reflexive idea of
representation grounded in repetition; partly because I want to suggest that such an
approach provides a way to understand the emergence, at a cognitive level, of
representational acts out of action per se, and partly because the ideas of action and
repetition involve a temporal emphasis conducive to a specifically narrative take on
representational acts. That is, I am interested in fictionality specifically as an
epiphenomenon of the emergence of narrative; my aim is to connect the most
2 Much contemporary narratology rests upon the assumption that the interpretation of fiction does
involve fictional objects (including much cognitive narratology, for reasons that I think can only be
attributed to the priming effect of the literary-philosophical training of many cognitive narratologists).
This assumption, to the extent that it is a theoretical premise rather than an unthinking echo of the idioms
of common talk about fictions, has been formalized in terms of fictional worlds, notably by Thomas
Pavel
(1986)
and Marie-Laure
Ryan (1991)
; and, in the more linguistic terms of narrative semantics, by
Lubom´ır
Dolezˇel (1980)
.
elaborate cultural manifestations of fictionality with the inaugural moves of
narrative cognition.3 To offer an account of fictionality’s emergence itself as a
narrative, however, is rather more problematic, precisely because of the
narrativeresistant logic of recursion that is a feature of the systemic relations underlying
emergent phenomena. This is a limitation of narrative cognition that I have
discussed elsewhere, and I won’t belabour it here; it is simply that the sequential
logic of narrative is unable to accommodate the multiplicity, simultaneity and
reciprocity of interactions involved in systemic processes, even as our cognitive
grasp of process is constrained by that sequential logic; and therefore the
accessibility of emergent behaviours to narrative representation comes only at the
cost of woeful misrepresentation of the systemic interactions actually producing that
behaviour.4 This limitation upon narrative representation in general implies that
there are some considerable barriers to understanding inherent in my own specific
undertaking here, and if I am to make any progress at all, I need to acknowledge
them. So, I have to grant immediately that there is a necessary tension between my
appeal to systemic processes and the form of my argument as a narrative of
(conceptual) origins. To conceive of representation as a reflexive process grounded
in repetition is not really to ground it at all, because there is a circularity lurking in
the formulation. Nothing ever happens twice, except under interpretation—which is
to say, except as represented. Repetition is itself already reflexive.
Let me begin again
Reflexiveness in literary contexts tends to be assimilated to metafictional
selfreference; that is to say, in literary criticism we think of reflexiveness in terms of the
various ways in which a work may overtly foreground the artifice and
conventionality of its own features as fiction, as narrative, as representation, or as language. In
this sense reflexiveness is typically regarded as a sophisticated and highly
selfconscious feature of narrative; whereas my purpose is to offer a contrary view,
which sees reflexiveness as elementary, pervasive, and constitutive not only of
fictionality itself but also of the pre-requisite possibility of narrative representation.
Metafictional reflexiveness has in the past been castigated as a decadent practice
in literary-critical discourse. It is has been viewed as a malaise, a symptom of the
death of the novel, the defining quality of a literature of exhaustion, in John
Barth’s
classic formulation (1967
). In the heady early days of postmodernism it was both
celebrated and castigated as a scandalous expose´, or dereliction, of fiction’s cultural
role, provoking neo-realist backlash even as the devices of metafictionality and
selfreflexive irony went mainstream and lost their antinomian aura; as Gerald Graff
trenchantly noted in response to the latter development, consumer capitalism is
3 In pursuing this narrative lineage, of course, I am neglecting forms of fictionality (in the visual arts, for
example) that are not contingent upon narrative.
4 A fuller exposition of the double bind entailed in the narrative representation of systemic processes can
be found in Walsh (2011a). A volume of essays in preparation, Narrating complexity, directly explores
the problem in dialogue between narratologists and complex systems scientists (Stepney and Walsh
forthcoming).
more than happy to commodify its own ironization
(Graff 1979, 223–224)
. Even
attempts to engage positively with the strategies of postmodern metafictionality
have had to proceed by negotiating with its highly suspect cultural status. I might
cite David Foster Wallace’s heroic efforts in his own fiction to push through
metafictionality to the other side of irony, the cultural pervasiveness of which had
become enervating
(Wallace 1993)
. Or we might consider the way Linda
Hutcheon’s influential formulation of ‘‘historiographic metafiction’’ vindicates
metafiction’s obsession with its own artifice by reading it as a demonstration of the
similar, but unacknowledged, artifice of non-fictional narrative discourses
(Hutcheon 1988)
, a view in which fiction’s retort to historiography is, in effect,
‘‘you think I’m bad?’’ Or we might recall Brian McHale learning to ‘‘stop worrying
and love postmodernism’’ by reading it as a formal, metafictional interrogation of
ontology (albeit founded upon the sort of fictional worlds semantics I’ve just
rejected) which nonetheless is ultimately recuperated in terms of a meta-thematics
of love and death
(McHale 1991, 217–232)
.
The most carefully formalist analysis of postmodern metafiction, however, is also
the one in which its categorical distinctiveness starts to break down. This is Patricia
Waugh’s Metafiction, which proposes a ‘‘sliding scale of metafictional practices’’
(1984, 115); pursuing this classification from the moderate to the extreme, Waugh
arrives at an unexpected endpoint, concluding that ‘‘all fiction is thus implicitly
metafictional’’ (1984, 148). We might arrive at similar conclusions by following this
sliding scale in the other direction. Once detached from the particular context of
postmodernism, metafictionality of course assumes a much more integral place in
the whole history of fiction. Without any redefinition of its scope, it is there—
explicitly, if sporadically—almost everywhere you look. It is strongly correlated
with liminal moments in the history of narrative fictions; moments of various kinds,
on various scales. So it is there at a particular narrative crux in Trollope, or in the
framing of a twice-told tale by Hawthorne, or the renouncement of an out-moded
convention in Diderot. The most striking outbreaks of extensive metafictionality
seem to coincide with the early stages of a new genre, form, or medium of fiction.
Obvious cases would be Don Quixote, or Tristram Shandy; but the same might be
said, for example, about the intensely self-reflexive negotiations between
illusionism and narrative in the first years of cinema.5 Metafictional reflexivity, in other
words, would be a powerful lens through which to take a diachronic perspective
upon generic fictionality.
But from my point of view here, metafictionality is just the most overt and
performative end of a spectrum of kinds of reflexiveness; the reflexiveness that is
most fundamentally, I suggest, the generative principle for fictive narrative acts in
particular and for acts of narrative representation in general. I’ve emphasized the
liminal status of metafictionality because it accords with, and epitomizes, the
inaugural function of reflexiveness in a much more general sense, as a recursive
series of representational moves: metafictionality is a feature of the emergence of
5 The complexity of these negotiations is apparent in Tom Gunning’s ‘‘The cinema of attractions: Early
film, its spectator and the avant garde’’ (1990), as well as in several of the other essays in the same
volume.
new cultural forms and genres just as the principle of reflexiveness is a feature of
representation inherent in the systemic logic of emergence itself. That is to say,
beyond the threshold of overt reflexiveness there is a larger continuity that extends
all the way from the basic logic of mimesis to the self-conscious baring of the
device that, for the Russian Formalists, defined the literary
(Shklovsky 1965b,
26–30)
. Shklovsky famously declared Tristram Shandy ‘‘the most typical novel in
world literature’’ (26), and I want to appropriate the remark in a sense that goes well
beyond the terms of Shklovsky’s own polemic. I can use the double logic of his own
account of defamiliarization to partially justify the theft, however. Defamiliarization
is, apparently, both the arch-principle of literariness as a ceaseless reflexive
foregrounding of artifice and, at the same time, the basis upon which the value of the
literary is affirmed in terms of a phenomenal aesthetics of everyday life;
defamiliarization serves to prolong perception, to ‘‘make the stone stony’’
(Shklovsky 1965a, 12)
. Defamiliarization, that is, faces both ways; its
selfconscious dissociation from experience is itself the condition of its orientation
towards it.
My point is that mimesis and baring the device are not antagonists but
accomplices; and further, that this reciprocity does not only apply at the level of
literary narrative, but across the whole range of narrative representations, including
the mental representations of narrative cognition. Reflexiveness is not the
destruction of representation, because representation is reflexive. More than that,
representation is actually constituted by reflexivity, and reflexivity intrinsically
constitutes representation. The possibility of recursion, of return, of repetition,
entails representation because nothing ever happens twice, except under
interpretation. Repetition is itself already reflexive.
Let me begin again
When the neurological research on mirror neurons first appeared, it struck a chord
with many scholars interested in the relation between literature and the way our
brains work. The interest, however, had less to do with the phenomenon described in
the neurological research than the term itself—with that particular way of
conceptualizing the findings. The neuroscientific phenomenon was first observed
and described in a 1992 paper
(Di Pellegrino et al. 1992)
, but the term ‘‘mirror
neuron’’ was not coined until 4 years later
(Gallese et al. 1996)
. The mirror
metaphor captured widespread attention, not least in literary-critical circles where it
inevitably evoked a whole tradition in Western aesthetics, that classic trope for
mimesis epitomized by Hamlet’s injunction to the players at Elsinore to hold ‘‘the
mirror up to nature’’ (III.ii). The neuroscience of mirror neurons seemed to provide
an empirical foundation for a whole set of literary-theoretical ideas about
representation, especially fictional representation, as well as about the nature of
readers’ engagement and emotional involvement with it; and, as enticingly, it
offered a new scientific terminology with which to describe these things. In
particular, it led to a widespread and somewhat hasty assumption that mirror
neurons corroborated theories of mental simulation—an argument put forward by
Gallese and Goldman (1998)
—and that this confirmed certain theories of reader
response to fictive representations (notably, fictional worlds theories).
I particularly admire Marie-Laure Ryan’s response to all this in ‘‘Narratology and
cognitive science: A problematic relation’’ (2010). The article was occasioned by
one of many popularising press releases hailing the confirmation of theories of
mental simulation by neuroscientific research (in this case, specifically in response
to narratives, as registered in MRI scans). Ryan’s own work has long advocated a
fictional worlds model of readers’ experiences of fictions, as well as a view of reader
involvement as virtual cognitive and affective immersion in those worlds, and she
acknowledged the temptation, perhaps as strong for her as for anybody, to hail this
kind of neurological research as final scientific validation of her arguments. She was
tempted, but she resisted; she did not fall. On further reflection her critical faculties
prevailed, and she adopted a highly sceptical stance on the extent to which the
empirical findings actually justified the interpretative gloss given them by the
science media and by less rigorous scholars. Her reasons were several, but the one I
would pick out is the way in which the interpretative gloss given to neuroscientific
research has a tendency to presuppose the very things it is taken to demonstrate.
This circularity is particularly evident in the transition from research papers to
journalistic articles, as in the case with which
Ryan begins (2010
, 470–471), but it is
also frequently, and more insidiously, a tendency in the conceptualization of the
research itself.
The conception of mirror neurons is a case in point; the enthusiasm with which
some narratologists and literary scholars have embraced the mirror metaphor
disregards the extent to which its original use had already imported the connotations
of that metaphor, precisely because of their cultural currency. Yet while the
excitement around mirror neurons in narratological circles has naturally tended to
understand the metaphor in terms of the virtual image in the mirror, that archetype
of mimesis, the metaphor was originally used to characterise the action of these
neurons. That is to say, a mirror neuron is one triggered when a certain action is
performed and when the same action is witnessed; which suggests that if the
metaphor is applicable at all, it might more plausibly be taken another way. A
reflection, indeed, is not a representation in the artefactual sense in which that term
is commonly understood, but the effect of a situated process of observation; there is
no image in the mirror independent of the act of viewing it. A reflection is a ‘‘reflex
image,’’ in the sense most familiar from the term ‘‘single lens reflex camera,’’ an
epiphenomenal result of the turning back of light by the reflective surface of the
mirror, which is only resolved into any form at all from the perspective of a specific
subject position. And as a matter of fact, the scientific research on mirror neurons
has a closer relation to reflexes—in the sense of automatic actions—than to images.
The firing of a mirror neuron is not a mirroring in the sense of an imaging, but in the
sense of a repetition, at the neurological level, of the associated action perceived in
another. Ah—but even as repetition, it does not so much produce as presuppose a
representational relation: nothing ever happens twice, except under interpretation.
Repetition is itself already reflexive.
My title, ‘‘The Fictive Reflex,’’ is designed to bridge the gap between
‘‘reflexiveness’’ in the familiar literary sense and ‘‘reflex’’ in the sense it has in ‘‘reflex
action.’’ Both, of course, trace their etymology back to the same source in classical
Latin, reflexus, meaning bent or curved back (OED). But a reflex in the sense of a
reflex action, strictly defined, is a connection between a sensory neuron and a motor
neuron via a reflex arc, and so not routed via the brain or mediated by cognition; a
simple feedback loop between body and environment. Reflexes are therefore
involuntary actions; indeed the concept of reflex action, though not the word itself,
was introduced by Descartes as part of his mechanistic account of the body, as
distinct (in humans) from the attributes of reason, mind and soul (1664/1972).
Reflex and reflexiveness on the Cartesian model, then, respectively mark the poles
of an antithesis between, on the one hand, unconscious, automatic behaviour and, on
the other, rational, conscious behaviour. Modern psychology has a more capacious
view than Descartes’s of what mind is, and what thinking is—a view that
accommodates both the automatic and the reflective, thinking fast and slow
(Kahneman 2011)
. But some residue of the old Cartesian dualism still remains
unless we can conceive of conscious thinking as something that emerges,
ontogenetically and phylogenetically, out of reflex action.
My own concern here is to emphasize the continuity, rather than antithesis,
between reflex and reflexiveness, by seeing them as a complementary pair. The
relation between them is between two aspects of the same formal move, that turning
back on itself. Conceived as reflex, this is a move defined within the parameters of
some systemic set of relations; conceived as reflexiveness it is the same move, with
respect to the same set of relations, but understood now in terms of the difference
inaugurated by the move itself. This difference (for that which turns back is not that
upon which it returns) opens up an external, emergent perspective upon the systemic
domain in which it occurs, which can be understood as the general condition for the
incipience of the representational relation. On this view, reflex always produces and
makes available the possibility of reflexiveness, and it is for this reason that it is a
mechanism primed for emergence within any system. The mediating term here,
between systemic and emergent, between act and representation, is the implicit. The
implicit is a liminal space created in turning back, itself a property of behaviour at
the systemic level but already latently a vehicle for emergent behaviour at a higher
level.6 Recursively, at every level, reflex becomes reflexiveness; the implicit
becomes explicit; what was act becomes occasion. Recursion both is and is not
repetition, because nothing ever happens twice, except under interpretation.
Repetition is itself already reflexive.
6 The implicit, which leads on representation without itself being representation, has a proto-semiotic
function analogous to the proto-communicative function of the ‘‘manifest’’ in the pragmatic, speech-act
oriented context of Relevance Theory
(Sperber and Wilson 1986)
.
I want to say that narratives in general, and fictions in particular, are representations,
and mean by that not that they correlate with objects of representation but that they
are acts of representation. This way of formulating the issue evidently raises a kind
of grounding problem; a concern about where, if not in relation to an object, we are
to place the foundations of representation. But the grounding problem was always
there; if objects of representation are not themselves already representations—that
would be the condition of their foundational status—then they do nothing in
themselves to account for a representational relation towards them. This issue
doesn’t go away when we pursue the logic of narrative representation back to some
notion of primary cognitive templates for narrative representation, such as the
varieties of image schema Mark Turner uses as the foundations for story and parable
in The Literary Mind (1996); even here the elementary cognitive figure, conceived
as grounded in embodied experientiality, harbours an ambiguity: if the image
schema is itself representational (and it must be to do its work), what is it a
representation of, and how does that representational relation arise? It won’t do to
say, in effect, it’s turtles all the way down, and this is where I think enactive
approaches to cognition can help. My suggestion is that what is needed is the
category of the implicit, which is not representation but which opens up the
cognitive space for a reflexive move that inaugurates representation. There is much
in the speech-act theory tradition of communicative pragmatics that lends weight to
this idea, and the generalization I am proposing from communicative behaviour to
representational behaviour, or representation, as such, is not a huge leap. The
implicit does the required work in mediating between action and representation
precisely because the implicit is inherent in behaviour at a very fundamental level;
not just conscious, deliberative behaviour but all oriented or responsive behaviour as
such, in the broadest biological sense—I mean in a sense that encompasses bacterial
behaviour as well as human behaviour.
I am seeking to draw out the full import of the basic philosophical re-orientation
involved in an approach to fiction, narrative representation, and representation as
such in terms of acts; as reflexive cycles of action within an enactive account of
cognition. The re-orientation involved is, I would suggest, from substance
metaphysics to process metaphysics7; from the kind of intellectual stance that is
driven by a methodology of analytic reduction, seeking always to identify more
fundamental elements, things, stuff, to the kind of stance that, on the contrary, is
always looking to synthesize more inclusive acts, events, processes. The point I
want to emphasize is that process philosophy is not a way for substance philosophy
to evade its problems with foundationalism; if it applies, it applies systemically. It is
in the domain of systems thinking that the concept of emergence belongs, and much
of what I’m reaching towards here has to do with trying to think about fictive acts,
narrative acts and representational acts as themselves the emergent behaviours of
systemic processes. Enactivism, in other words, does not serve to launch
7 The entry on process philosophy in The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy helps to clarify the issues
here
(Seibt 2013)
.
representationalism; rather, you might say, it’s turtles all the way up. My thought
here shares with recent trends in evolutionary literary studies an interest in the
continuity between basic cognitive affordances and cultural phenomena in general
(or in my case, fictive rhetoric in particular); but my claim is that such continuities
should be conceived in terms of reflexive processes and levels of emergence in a
systemic paradigm rather than in the form of narrative accounts of the more or less
mediated causal relations between cognition and culture.8 But it must be
acknowledged that it is hard to resist making these connections in a narrative
mode of explanation, even though systemic processes, by their nature, are not
amenable to it; and it is equally hard even to recognize the explanatory force of
arguments that are not cast in narrative form.
One of the ways in which I have previously tried to tell such a non-story, and
which may serve as a clarifying example here, concerned the possible common
cognitive roots of music and narrative in pre-linguistic communicative behaviour
characterized in terms of its somatic, social and affective dimensions
(Walsh
2011b)
. The conceptual focus of this inquiry was rhythm, and it seems to me now
that more could be said about the place of rhythm in our cognitive development and
in the emergence of representational behaviour. Rhythm, after all, is as pure an
instance of repetition as you are likely to find. For rhythm to be perceptible as such,
that is to say for it to be rhythm at all, requires the persistence in a rudimentary
sense of what is past; a beat, however manifest, is only a beat relative to a prior
beat.9 That implicit relation, effectively constitutive of phenomenal temporality, can
serve as an archetype for the way I am trying to formulate the general conditions for
reflexiveness to become manifest, and for the cognitive and communicative
architecture of representational, narrative and fictive behaviour, recursively, to
emerge. Otherwise, after all, each separate beat or pulse is just what it is. Nothing
ever happens twice, except under interpretation. Repetition is itself already
reflexive.
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
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8 For an approach to evolutionary literary studies that gives a central place to narrative, see
Boyd 2009
.
9 This formulation has the slightly counter-intuitive implication that there is in a sense no first beat,
except retrospectively; Peter Rabinowitz (in conversation) has proposed the reverse—that a beat is only a
beat relative to a following beat. But that has the more serious disadvantage that every beat becomes a
beat retrospectively, which conflicts with the necessary attentional focus on the present beat (the punctual
nature of which is fundamental to its phenomenal quality as a beat and to the possibility of rhythmic
entrainment).
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